“My mother,” Mira told me over tea in Mrs. London’s Teashop in Saratoga last week when she came to visit, “always said that Elmira was a family name. She was adamant that I take it, and when I had you, she made such a fuss about giving it to you that I figured I’d better do it. She was right about most things. But I always wondered about Elmira and Ellis. Of course it wasn’t uncommon for girls to have different versions of their mothers’ names, so maybe your great-grandmother was really ‘Elmira.’ I can’t find a birth certificate for her, so we’ll probably never know.”
The reason there wasn’t a birth certificate, I’m fairly sure now, is that ten-year-old Ellis Brooks, my great-grandmother, was Alice Latham. She was the right age when the sisters moved to Lily Dale and she appeared out of nowhere. Mira brought with her to the tea shop a copy of the 1890 census for Erie County listing only one daughter, age fourteen, living with the Brooks family on Forest Avenue in Buffalo. Where else would a ten-year-old daughter come from just three years later?
“Of course she was Corinth’s daughter,” Mira said, taking a delicate sip of the house blend, a lavender-scented Earl Grey that I could have sworn my mother picked to match her outfit: a lavender linen shift with a deeper lilac sweater tied across her shoulders and amethyst crystal drops hanging from her ears. The color suited her and what was more, while the outfit was not radically different from her usual garb, it looked somehow better cut and more expensive. When Mira retied the sweater, I noticed an Eileen Fisher label on the neckline. “My grandmother always said that her mother was a famous medium,” Mira continued, “and that they’d had to leave Buffalo because the neighbors complained about ‘strange noises’ coming from the house at night. Well, I had a look through the archives of the Buffalo newspaper and found that there was, indeed, an article about neighbors complaining about rapping noises coming from the Brooks house on Forest Avenue. The reporter compared the incident to the Fox sisters back in the 1840s, but what’s interesting is that the rapping at the Brookses began in the fall of 1893.”
“When Alice would have arrived.”
“Yes, the article mentions two young sisters and says that they had decided to seek out a ‘more sympathetic’ community in Lily Dale, where an aunt and uncle of theirs lived—”
“An aunt and uncle? You never mentioned that your grandmother was brought up by an aunt and uncle.”
“Didn’t I?” Mira asked, tilting her head to one side. “Of course, they were both very old when I was born and died soon after.”
“They were still alive when you were born? Do you remember them? Are there any pictures?”
Mira looked up to the ceiling as if trying to discern a likeness to her ancestors in its stamped-tin pattern of vine and flower. “I do remember she had very beautiful hands,” she said, a vague, dreamy expression stealing over her face, “but she always wore gloves when she went out except . . . Oh, my, you know, I haven’t thought of this in years . . .”
“What?” I said, leaning forward so impatiently that I knocked my teacup out of its saucer and onto the floor, where the delicate china shattered. The teenaged girl behind the counter hurried over with a whisk and dustpan, and I knelt on the floor to help her collect the broken pieces. When I took my seat again, I saw that Mira’s attention had drifted toward the front of the shop.
“There’s an adorable man looking this way and waving with a handkerchief,” she said. “Do you know him?”
An adorable man? When in the world had my mother ever referred to a man as adorable? I looked behind me and saw Zalman Bronsky, in a very handsome white linen suit, leaning on the silver-tipped cane he’d used since his cast came off, saluting us with his handkerchief as if he were signaling from the deck of a yacht. He looked, indeed, as if he could have just sailed in a regatta at Newport. He looked, I had to agree, adorable.
“That’s Zalman Bronsky, the poet; he’s one of the guests at Bosco. You know, the one who broke his leg last winter? Diana Tate extended his stay while his leg is still healing.”
“Oh, the man who writes such lovely poems about Madame Blavatsky. Don’t you think we should ask him over? There are no other free tables and he oughtn’t to stand too long on his injured leg.”
Put that way, I could hardly object. Nor could I help but offer to get Zalman his tea and pastry. When I came back to the table, I found that my mother and Zalman had discovered that in addition to Madame Blavatsky they shared a passion for Pythagoras and were happily discussing the Greek philosopher’s vegetarianism and ability to talk to animals. I stayed for a while, but when Zalman offered to show Mira the springs in Congress Park, I realized that I’d become a bit of a third wheel. I pleaded work as an excuse for heading back to the cabin. When I kissed my mother good-bye, I noticed that Mira had also changed her perfume. Instead of patchouli she was wearing a light floral scent that smelled like roses and vanilla. I left Zalman and Mira on Broadway and drove back to the cabin in Nat’s beat-up old Saab. Only later did I realize that I never found out what Mira remembered about her great-great-aunt’s hands.
Now, on the dock, I flex my own hands over the laptop. When I brought up the anecdote on the phone with my mother later, Mira said that her memory must have been playing tricks on her. The image of the glove-wearing great-great-aunt had slipped away. If she remembered anything else, though, she’d tell me when she came to town in August, when, she told me with an uncharacteristically girlish lilt in her voice, Zalman and she were going to the races. I haven’t heard from my mother since and I’m not counting on any more revelations. Clearly my mother is busy thinking about other things and I would be the last one to begrudge her—or Zalman—some happiness. The glove-wearing great-great-aunt was probably nothing more than what Mira called it: a trick of memory.
When I look down I see that my laptop’s screen has gone black again, but instead of resuscitating it, I snap the lid shut and slide it into my backpack. I look back toward the house and see that Nat’s on the front porch, where he’s set up his typewriter on an old card table. As usual he’s got his feet up on the card table and he’s staring out into the distance. Clearly he’s not writing, but still I don’t want to disturb him in case inspiration is about to alight. I decide to take a walk into the bog instead. Maybe if I go back to the spot by the tamarack tree and sit there long enough, I’ll finally be able to write the scene of Corinth’s death and its aftermath.
I take the path into the bog, stopping to pick some bog laurel and peppermint, which I use when I make iced tea. Nat swears it has the same smoky undertone of a good Laphroaig, which is as close as he gets to the scotch these days. Although Diana Tate offered him a bottle to celebrate selling the cabin to him when he left Bosco, Nat turned it down. “I’m sure David will make good use of it,” he said with only a hint of his old sarcasm in his voice.
Even though the destruction of the garden had discouraged the Garden Conservancy from funding the restoration (“They don’t like it when a garden is in worse shape after the conservator has a go at it,” David had told me on my last visit to Bosco), David and Bethesda decided to stay at Bosco to write a history of the gardens together. I’ve gone back a few times to visit them and Zalman and to see if the ruined garden would inspire me to write this last scene, but the last time I was there I felt sure that the end of the story wasn’t there. I’m beginning to wonder, though, if it’s here.
I find the toppled tamarack tree, which has already turned a reddish brown in the water since it fell last winter. If I lean over the water, I can just catch a glimpse of the china plaque with Alice’s name on it. Soon, though, it will be covered with moss and hidden from sight, swallowed by the bog just as baby Alice was.
I sit down on a bed of sphagnum moss by the water’s edge. I’m not afraid of seeing her anymore. Since the séance I’ve felt she’s at peace. But what about Corinth? I unleashed her spirit from Wanda’s spell and let her tell Tom that Alice—or Elmira—was their child. Was it enough? Had it satisfied her spirit? I close my eye
s and listen to the birdsong in the trees and the croaking of mink frogs and the whir of insects in the bog. I can even hear water dripping into pitcher plants and soaking into the emerald carpet of moss beneath me and draining into the mat that floats over the bog’s deep underground pool. I feel as if I’m floating, but I can’t feel Corinth here. And yet, wouldn’t they have buried her here—with the baby?
I open my eyes and see something white beside my foot. Even before I pick it up I know by its scent that it’s a ghost orchid, not growing, but loose, as if someone picked it and left it here. I pick it up to take back to Nat, but when I arrive at the cabin, I hear a tapping that I think, at first, is a woodpecker, but then realize is the sound of Nat’s typewriter. So I slip inside and put the orchid into a glass bowl of water.
Only much later, when the typing has long stopped, do I go out to the porch with two glasses of iced tea. I hand one to Nat, who’s sitting in one of the old Adirondack chairs. In addition to the tea I’ve brought out the bowl with the orchid in it, which I place on the porch railing, where it catches the late afternoon light. Then I sit in the other Adirondack chair and take a sip of the iced tea—which does, indeed, have the smoky taste of good scotch. I’m dying to ask Nat what he was writing today, but I’m afraid to focus too bright a light on whatever wisp of inspiration he’s gotten ahold of. So instead I ask him if he’s remembered anything new today. Like Mira, Nat’s memory has been playing tricks on him this summer, inventing incidents that seem entirely new to Nat. And although one might expect such recovered memories to be of traumatic events, they’re usually of something kind of nice. A memory of his grandfather taking him fishing on the reservoir and even taking him to the overlook to see the sign about Ne’Moss-i-Ne.
“Well, there is something,” he says. “Here, let me show you something.”
Nat leans forward in his chair and holds out his hands, turning them first palms up, then palms down. Then he reaches toward me and pulls a flower out from behind my ear. Even before I see it I can smell it: sweet, spicy vanilla. Nat displays the white orchid with a flourish and hands it to me.
“How did you do that?” I ask, dipping my head to inhale the orchid’s creamy scent.
“Well, I suddenly remember that my grandfather taught me how. On my fifth birthday—an event I could have sworn was not attended by him at all since it was in Darien, Connecticut, and he hated Darien. But now I’ve got this picture”—Nat holds up his thumbs and forefingers to make a frame—“of him in the backyard pulling coins out of my ear to the amusement of all my friends. And he tells me that on his fifth birthday the carnival came to town and a tall, dark-haired magician taught him that trick.”
I open my mouth to say something but then think better of it.
Nat takes a sip of his iced tea and lets his eyes drift over the pond. The late afternoon sun has turned the water copper and gold. In the distance I hear the long eerie cry of a loon and then, a moment later, the answering call of its mate.
“It’s crazy,” Nat says, “but I swear I never knew how to do that magic trick before.” I look over to the glass where the orchid I found today still floats. What I’d like to ask is where he found the orchid in my hands. Instead I ask him if he’d like to take a drive.
“Sure,” he says. “Where to?”
“The overlook,” I say.
On the way to the overlook we stop in the little post office in town and pick up our mail. Most of it is for Nat—copies of Bomb and the New Yorker, fan mail forwarded from his publisher, and a letter from his agent—all of which he tosses in the backseat of the car. The only thing for me is a small parcel from my mother, which I open as Nat drives. I’m distracted from its contents by Nat suddenly saying, as if continuing our conversation of half an hour ago on the porch, “You think the past has changed because of what happened during the séance, don’t you? And you know who the magician was.”
I turn to him, but he’s looking straight ahead at the road. Even on a clear day the reservoir road can have unexpected patches of fog. “Yes,” I say, “I think it was Tom Quinn and that he became a different person because of what Corinth told him before she died. He didn’t go out west, he stayed with Alice in Lily Dale, and maybe he came back to see his and Violet’s son.”
“His and Violet’s son? You think my grandfather was Tom Quinn’s son?”
“Well,” I say, “that’s how I wrote it.” I finished the scene a few days ago, describing Violet Ramsdale’s last days in Dr. Murdoch’s household, when she knew that the baby she’d borne was not the only thing growing in her womb all those months. I had been surprised at how painful it had been to write it because Mrs. Ramsdale wasn’t a particularly sympathetic character, but who wouldn’t pity a woman looking at her child’s face and knowing she wouldn’t live to see its first birthday? So I’d given Violet one last redemptive act: writing the pamphlet that exonerated Corinth Blackwell and then sending it to the Spiritualists’ Society in Lily Dale in the hope that if Corinth Blackwell and Tom Quinn had survived it would find its way into their, or their descendants’, hands someday.
“It would explain why Murdoch was so awful to the child,” I say, “if he knew it wasn’t his. And it might explain why your grandfather was such a miserable man.”
“You realize that means we’re related,” Nat says, sliding his eyes toward me.
“Distantly. We’re like half cousins twice removed or something. Would that bother you?”
“Not at all. I’m just thinking about our kids . . .”
“Kids?” I repeat, but we’ve reached the overlook and Nat is already out of the car and heading toward the cliff. The path that was knee-high in snow last winter is now carpeted in gold pine needles. The view was obscured by fog then, but now I can see the Great Sacandaga Lake, swollen wider and deeper than the original river, covering the old valley. The sun is sinking behind a line of mountains to the west, painting a wavy gold path that springs from a cleft in the mountains and snakes across the lake like the ghost of the old river. For an instant I see the valley as it was before it was flooded and hear the river rushing over the rocks below me. I reach into my pocket and pull out the white kid glove that was in my mother’s package. I found this in one of your great-grandmother’s old trunks, Mira had written. Take a look at the initials sewn on the hem.
I brush my fingers along the delicate stitching. CB. Of course it could be anyone, but when I look down over the cliff I see, instead of the dark water of the reservoir, a beach of smooth white stones. A girl is kneeling on the beach making a pyramid out of the stones; a tall man is standing with his back to the cliff. A woman kneels by the girl as together they place a round white stone on top of the pile. The woman’s hair falls forward and merges with the girl’s hair, both flashing red in the last rays of the setting sun. I blink against the glare, and when I open my eyes the white rocks have disappeared under the dark water and the only flash of red comes from a red-winged blackbird skimming the smooth surface, flying west.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CAROL GOODMAN is the author of The Lake of Dead Languages, The Seduction of Water, and The Drowning Tree. The Seduction of Water won the 2003 Hammett Prize, and her other novels have been nominated for the Dublin/IMPAC Award and the Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her fiction has been translated into eight languages. She teaches writing at The New School in New York City.
BY CAROL GOODMAN
The Drowning Tree
The Seduction of Water
The Lake of Dead Languages
The Ghost Orchid is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Carol Goodman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
br /> BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
“Searching for the Source of Egeria’s Tears” is published by permission of The Classical Outlook: Journal of the American Classical League (originally published in vol. 82, no. 1, Fall 2004, p. 22) and Lee Slonimsky.
“The Eloquence of Water” and “Tunnel Walk, Spring Above” are published by permission of SRLR Press, Austin, Texas, James Michael Robbins, editor (originally published in Money and Light by Lee Slonimsky), and Lee Slonimsky.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Goodman, Carol.
The ghost orchid : a novel / Carol Goodman.
p. cm.
eISBN 0-345-49090-8
1. Biographers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.O566G48 2006
813′.6—dc22 2005048238
www.ballantinebooks.com
v1.0
Carol Goodman, The Ghost Orchid